Session: Teach – THATCamp CHNM 2013

Intermediate Omeka

Amanda French — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 17:36:28 +0000

Because of popular demand, and because an extra slot opened up in the schedule, I’ve agreed to teach an Intermediate Omeka workshop on Saturday. (I may have to end it a bit early to set things up for challenge voting, though.)

Mostly what I’ll do in this session is answer any questions that people have left over from the Intro to Omeka workshop, but chances are I’ll demonstrate how to obtain server space, how to install the server-side version of Omeka, how to install themes and plugins from omeka.org, and how to customize a server-side installation of Omeka.

Great (and simple) Omeka exhibits

Waldorf-Astoria Exhibits – www.hosttotheworld.com/omeka/exhibits
Greenwich Village History Exhibits – gvh.aphdigital.org/exhibits/

Installing Omeka

Hosting Suggestions – omeka.org/codex/Hosting_Suggestions
Preparing to Install Omeka – omeka.org/codex/Preparing_to_Install
Installation step by step – omeka.org/codex/Installation

Customizing Omeka

There are many helpful documents on the Omeka Documentation page. The “Recipes” near the bottom are particularly helpful to beginners. See, for instance, the Recipe for how to set a default thumbnail image for items that don’t have an associated image file: omeka.org/codex/Recipes/Default_Item_Thumbnail_Images That’s a very similar process to the example we went over briefly in class for my project at steepletoplibrary.org of setting a regular thumbnail instead of a square thumbnail for items such as steepletoplibrary.org/items/show/1057 that do have an uploaded image. See also the full list of PHP Functions for Omeka — these are “template” pieces of code that will make a particular common thing happen (such as showing the thumbnail or the square thumbnail).

Note that any competent graphic designer who knows HTML and CSS can customize the look and feel of Omeka, and any competent PHP developer can customize the functionality of Omeka. You can pick up HTML, CSS, and PHP skills yourself from the Internet or from a book, but if you need extensive customization, you should hire someone. (You could for instance hire someone from the “Designer / Developer Marketplace” on the Omeka forums.) It’s kind of like your car: you can learn to change the oil, gap the spark plugs, and rebuild the carburetor yourself if you want to, or you can pay someone else to do all that. The Omeka team at the Center for History and New Media is like the team of Detroit-based engineers at General Motors, but there are designers and developers everywhere who, like auto mechanics, can work on your specific problems.

JSTOR Data for Research workshop

michaelkrot — Wed, 29 May 2013 15:18:07 +0000

In this workshop we will provide both a general overview of the JSTOR Data for Research (DfR) service and a “how to” for using Hadoop and cloud computing for text mining large datasets. For the big data mining portion of the workshop we will be using a large dataset consisting of the JSTOR Early Journal Content (EJC) collection. A bundle of metadata and full text for the approximately 460,000 articles in the EJC collection can be downloaded from the DfR site. For this tutorial we have pre-loaded the EJC content into Amazon Web Service (AWS) data storage and will provide instructions on how to use the AWS Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) service for efficiently mining this dataset. In this tutorial we’ll show how to create an AWS account, develop and submit Map-Reduce jobs (written in Python) and retrieve results. The examples provided will include the generation of ngrams from full text and the identification of the top words in articles via the calculation of TF*IDF scores.

Teaching Digital History

Jeffrey McClurken — Tue, 28 May 2013 13:20:17 +0000

This workshop (Friday at 1:30) will be aimed at working through the practical and pedagogical choices about creating a digital history course. We will explore sample syllabi, discuss potential projects, survey various tools, and identify obvious and not-so-obvious pitfalls to constructing a class that engages students in the scholarship and practice related to digital history. [Not an historian? Come join us anyway. Most of these ideas and approaches apply to incorporating technology into any course.]

Note: while there are no formal prerequisites to this workshop, please come with ideas for a course that you can discuss with the other workshop participants.

Introduction to Omeka

Sharon Leon — Fri, 24 May 2013 20:13:04 +0000

Instructor: Sharon Leon
Requirements:

A laptop
Sample materials (several images, pdfs, and audiovisual files would be great)
A free Omeka.net Basic account – sign up at www.omeka.net/signup

In this hands-on workshop for beginners, we will concentrate on the ways that humanities scholars and cultural heritage professionals can use Omeka (omeka.org) to build of collections-based websites. Omeka is a free and open source web publishing platform that offers a flexible way for users without a lot of technical expertise to publish digital collections and to embed those collection materials in a range of contextual data. During our time together, we will cover:

the basic structure of an Omeka repository
configuring and choosing a theme for an Omeka site
adding items to an Omeka repository (Dublin Core Metadata, file upload, etc.)
creating and using Collections to group materials
extending the basic Omeka functionality with plugins
creating many items quickly
using controlled vocabularies with metadata fields
creating relationships among items and collections
using Exhibit Building to create exhibits
collecting materials and stories from visitors
integrating Omeka with Zotero, Wikipedia, and other social networking sites

Can someone teach this? Intermediate Omeka

Judith Schwartz — Thu, 23 May 2013 23:37:30 +0000

Can someone teach an intermediate workshop for Omeka? Somewhere between an intro and advanced class. I know how to install Omeka and plugins, now what? The workshops I see are either too simple or too advanced. I would like to attend a workshop that would include how to modify a theme with some basic CSS and also setting up exhibits and simple pages. Are people linking their EAD finding aids in their Omeka sites? Is there an EAD plugin compatible with the updated Omeka? Can we discuss Omeka best practices. How are people naming files and digitizing collections that already have paper/Box/Folder/versions with pdf finding aids. How are CSV files of metadata working out for you? How are we actually working with Omeka and how are people teaching with Omeka?

3D Modeling and Printing Workshop

Jeremy Boggs — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:13:26 +0000

In this workshop, we’ll help participants get acquainted with tools and techniques for 3D modeling objects and spaces, editing their models, and hopefully have some viable models to use for 3D printing. We’ll have at least one 3D printer to play around with—a Makerbot Replicator 2—and a few different colors of filament to print with. We might have more than one printer, which’ll mean more printing! Participants should bring a laptop if possible, a digital camera of some kind (a camera on a smartphone should be fine, but bring a fancy DSLR if you want), cords or other paraphernalia for transferring pictures from a camera to a computer, and any objects they might want to use to create a model. I’ll try to bring a couple of cameras in case some folks need to borrow something. If the model we create in class isn’t viable for printing by the end of the workshop, participants can find a model somewhere like Thingiverse, and we can download and print that model. Heck, even if you do have a viable model to print and still want to print something off Thingiverse, we can try to find time. At the end of the workshop, we’d like everyone to be comfortable making their own 3D models, and have printed something on the 3D printer to take home.

This’ll be a pretty open workshop in terms of structure. We’ll go through basic camera usage, and strategies for taking pictures for 3D modeling. We’ll cover a couple of different software options for creating and modifying your models. We’ll also go over basics of 3D printing, and discuss the features and process of the 3D printer, maintenance and debugging strategies, and print some stuff. I’d love to leave time for discussion and reflection, and hope that through the process of learning how to do the modeling and printing, we can have some good conversations about how folks could use 3D modeling and printing in their scholarly work.

Atoms to Bits and back again

ghbrett — Mon, 20 May 2013 20:19:43 +0000

There have been sessions at past THATCamps that have explored the use of 3D design to envision historical sites or perhaps to demonstrate relationships of words in a concordance or index. In those cases the examples in most cases were a transference of Atoms (papers, manuscripts, notes from conversations) to bits (program design, programming, data entry, user interfaces). For this session I would like to explore your ideas and mine about the impact of Making, Tinkering, Physical Innovation to create 3 Dimensional Objects in the Digital Humanities.

One quick example: 1) Analog — a historian discovers description, perhaps with an illustration of a piece of table ware or furniture. She notes that it has certain qualities that she’d like to explore more. This is where the project moves into 2) Digital space. The object is sketched, then rendered into a 3D representation. Then that file is may need to be translated into a format that can be used by a 3D printer. The object can be scaled down or up to fit the 3D printer that will be used to “print” the object. Once the object is “printed” it has returned to an 1) Analog object. Now the object can be closely observed to better understand those curious qualities. There are many variations on this theme. Let’s share some of them.

A true story. At the San Diego Super Computer Center at UC-San Diego there was a Laminated Object Modeling (LOM) lab. Their printer used thin paper layers pasted then cut with lasers. They created a small model of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachian Mountains in the same scale. They were small, hand held objects. A ninth grade class on tour was shown the models and asked what did they learn from seeing these two objects. A young woman was the first to raise her hand. Her answer, “The Appalachians are older than the Rockies because they are worn down and smoother than the Rockies.” She was correct.

So, how could 3D tools and resources for Making or Tinkering be applied to ideas, questions, or the work in the Humanities you are doing?

Plea – Viewshare and Omeka Exhibit Workshop

Roberta Walker Kilkenny — Mon, 20 May 2013 01:17:20 +0000

This is a plea for a workshop on creating interfaces to digital collections using Viewshare and Omeka Exhibit. I have used both with my students but do not feel anywhere near proficient enough to facilitate a workshop. Both platforms seem to have a lot to offer for both academic and community-based projects.

Intro to Omeka Plugins

Patrick Murray-John — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:27:29 +0000

Q: Ever wanted to learn how to put together a new plugin for Omeka but wasn’t sure where to start?

A: This workshop!

We’ll look at the basic structure of an Omeka plugin and how the pieces fit together, then I’ll have some exercises ready for you to begin hacking on and expanding some example plugins.

Topics covered include creating a model for new kinds of content, understanding how Zend/Omeka connects URLs to controllers and views, and using best practices in Omeka’s code to make your life easier. The primary audience is people with some experience with PHP, especially Object-Oriented PHP, but the session will also be helpful to people who are beginners to coding in PHP and are curious about typical structures and paradigms for hacking on an Omeka installation.

We’ll be looking at Omeka code and going through activities that involve installing and manipulating example plugins, so you should come with an instance of Omeka 2.0 installed on your laptop.

UPDATE — links added!

We’ll be using the following three plugins as examples to help us learn some of the basic structures in Omeka plugins. Please come to the workshop with them installed in your Omeka site on your laptop — we’ll be directly editing them together and looking at the results on your laptop.

Click the ZIP link to download the plugin, or if you are a git user clone the repositories.

And some exercises for during and/or after the session.

QGIS Introduction

fred gibbs — Tue, 14 May 2013 14:13:43 +0000

The value of GIS in the humanities has been heavily discussed over the last few years, but it remains difficult for most humanists to get started and explore new methodologies, vocabularies, software, and procedures.

This fully introductory session will go over:

how to install QGIS (a free, open-source alternative to ArcGIS)
basic concepts of GIS software
finding and using shapefiles (to generate maps)
finding data to map
mapping historical data on a modern map (ie linking data to shapefiles)
mapping historical data on historic maps (ie map overlays)

We will walk through each of these procedures using an example of mapping civil war battles (because that’s what one does in Virginia).

R for humanists

fred gibbs — Tue, 14 May 2013 14:05:02 +0000

Text mining (TM) has been one of the most frequently discussed methodologies in the humanities in the last year, along with many tools can help with some basic and some not so basic TM methodologies. Although it may seem like overkill, learning how to use the statistical software package R for TM is a great way to learn more about some fundamental processes and how you can get more control over your own TM explorations.

This introductory workshop will demonstrate how to:

install R
use the R console (like the command line)
create a set of text files to explore
explore the basic TM features
create a visualization of document similarity

De-MOOCing the Past — Alternative Approaches to Online History Courses

Kelly Schrum — Thu, 02 May 2013 17:48:49 +0000

Looking past MOOC mania, there are many models for online teaching and learning. We’ll start the conversation at this workshop with some lessons learned from designing two asynchronous online history courses: Hidden in Plain Sight and Virginia Studies. Instructors include Kelly Schrum, Celeste Sharpe, Nate Sleeter, and Jeri Wieringa.

View Notes and Resources